AI “de-skilling”: What happens when we offload our work to AI? With Brooke Macnamara, PhD

In 370 BCE, Plato worried that writing would destroy people’s memories. He was right—we did lose the ability to recite epic poems from memory—but society adjusted and mostly stopped caring. Now, as AI tools handle everything from drafting emails to detecting polyps during colonoscopies, psychologist Brooke Macnamara of Purdue University is asking whether the same trade-off is playing out again, only this time with higher stakes. The core question is not whether AI makes us more productive in the short term—it clearly does—but what happens to our own skills when we stop using them.

Cognitive offloading: a very old pattern with a new twist

Macnamara frames the current moment as part of what scholars call the Sisyphian cycle of technology panics. Every new tool—writing, calculators, GPS, Google—prompts the same fear that we are losing something essential. And in many cases, we do lose the skill. People no longer memorize phone numbers or build mental maps of cities the way they once did. The difference with AI, Macnamara argues, is that earlier technologies mostly offloaded rote or procedural tasks. AI, by contrast, takes over components of cognitive work that were previously the exclusive domain of human experts: synthesizing information, making diagnostic judgments, and generating creative outputs. “If we are cognitively offloading to something else, and we're not engaging